The professional blog of Christopher Randel

A custom computer for a developer.

I like to keep up on hardware for work related reasons, as well as personal reasons, and I take a lot of interest in benchmarks, pricepoints, and forums. I’m very biased towards companies with consistently stable high quality computer hardware. Some companies whose products I consistently use might be Crucial Memory, Seagate, 3ware, or Supermicro. I’m certainly not getting paid to mention that, but I feel like I owe them sometimes for giving me more worry-free products.

The developers I work with seem to not be into sharing very much. They all like to run their own instances of sharepoint, their own local sql servers, sometimes even their own dc’s virtualized on either their personal computer or a company hosted server. To do this with any sort of efficiency, they need pretty high powered workstations. Below will be some pictures of one of these builds, a little explanation of why I bought what, and why I would spend the time out of my busy day to build a custom rig. On to the fun part, basically I got to custom build a desktop for a tech with big demands for virtualization. Take a peak at some pictures below. These pictures are a few months old, this post should be dated for a while ago, but that allows me to validate my claim of high quality and good performance.

A picture of the parts

As above, we have the following parts: [and a why in brackets]

• Antec Sonata III [with 500Watt Earthwatts power supply, a very high quality seasonic rebrand]
• Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3L Motherboard [P35 chipset is excellent, stable]
• 4x Corsair 2 GB DDR2-800 sticks [good brand, good price]
• Intel Q6600 2.4Ghz Processor [Cheapest Intel Quad-core, very, very powerful]
• eVGA Geforce 8600GT [Dual DVI porst, cheap, DX10/vista happy]
• Artic Freezer Pro 7 [Tried and True, quiet, Good Cooling, inexpensive.]
• Western Digital 640GB Hard disk [High Aureal Density, very fast, inexpensive]
• Samsung DVD Burner [Quietest dvd drive in the pack]
• Windows XP 64 bit [Works great, supports all 8GB of memory, no vista by request of developer.]

Action Screwdriver shot

Finished Product. Nice and clean insides!

So, why would I spend time to build a desktop like this? Because I can use high quality parts, and create a machine that is basically commercially unavailable for a very reasonable price. This whole box probably cost less than 1000$, good luck finding XP64 bit anywhere, let alone a box with 8GB of memory, a “special” super fast hard SATA hard disk, in a very quiet antec case with high efficiency power supply, and a quad-core. Further, any part that fails is easily replaced.

Tags: components, custom pc